I reviewed Sherpa yesterday. While it was very good, it was slow as molasses. Where GPS, or what most of my friends just call Where, is an app that does a lot of what Sherpa does and more. It does it very fast.

At the core, Where utilities your phone’s GPS in almost every aspect of it’s operation. You can manually change to any location by entering in a Zip code, so you can use this for trip planning as well. When you first launch Where, it asks if you are still where you were the last time you ran it. It’s at this point that you can use the GPS to find your location or enter a zip to get information. The nice thing about doing this upfront is it will not tax your battery as much as if it had to get a fix every time you tap.

Where also will give you the current temperature at the location right on the main screen. If that is not enough, tapping on the weather icon gives you more information about the day’s weather.

Tapping the forecast tab gives you the 10 day forecast from Accuweather.com. The only way the weather feature could be better was if had a Doppler radar image or animation.

One area Sherpa does not cover is news. The news feature of Where is very similar to Express News,with the exception that the categories are fixed and non customizable. News isn’t the focus of Where, but it is handy to have it in there.

The next feature is Yelp. Yelp looks to yelp.com for reviews of just about everything from restaurants to shopping. The nice thing about all searches in Where is that they will let you restrict results to as close as 0.1 miles away. This helps you find the best things that are very close to you. I will use this feature A LOT when I go out of town.

Next up is the shortcut feature. If you have searches that you frequently use, you can save them and use them again and again. To do this, you hit menu and then tap ‘Save Shortcut’ on any search results screen. This will save the list in your shortcut list so it can be recalled whenever you want.

Where also lets you save a list of places you go to all of the time, or that you might want to go to in the future. To save a place to this list you tap/hold on the place in any search dialog and a menu pops up letting you save it to your My Places list as a place that you go or as a place you want to go. You can also attach a note to this place on the same context menu. This may help when trying to build a list of places you want to check out when going out of town.

Most of the searches in Where use yellowpages.com You can also directly search yellowpages.com by using the YP.com icon.

Next up is the movies feature. In this, you can find the nearest theater. You can then also see the movies playing at the theater and the showtimes. You can also view a trailer right on the phone once you have selected a movie. Just tap the play button, and the trailer loads.

On Sherpa, you can find the closest gas station but that’s only part of the equation. You usually want to get the best prices for your car’s fuel. Where does find you the Gas Station, but it also shows you the lowest priced gas. Invaluable when money is tight!

There’s also some built in social networking in Where. Tap on the Where Wall to get to the World Wide Where Wall. In here you will see messages posted by Where users world wide. You can also drill down and find messages on the local Where Wall.

Have you ever wanted to eat out but could not decide where to eat? Guess Where can help. Guess Where uses the accelerometer in the G1 to play a game. The game is played by seeing how long you can keep the Where ball from hitting the Yellowpages ball. Once the ball connects, it will give you a nearby restaurant. Useful for when no one knows what they want.

Where also has a feature called The Pulse throughout the program that is semi-experimental. The Pulse item on the main menu will give you recent local tweets from Twitter, Friend Feed, Youtube and more. In other areas, The Pulse looks for stuff related to the subject matter like the weather. Kind of a fun way to find out what people near you are talking about. These are public tweets and status updates. Where has no integration with your friend lists at this time.

Where also does traffic from Traffic.com. It presents a list of the traffic incidents near your location.

Lastly, there’s a little green ball you might see on the right-hand side of the Where main menu. This is where you can manage and select your favorite brands. To add brands, you tap on the Manage button and you can add brands like Walmart, McDonald’s, Target, Best Buy, Zipcar and more. Once you have a brand here, a simple tap on any of their logos will instantly do a search to find where you can get that Big Mac or Starbuck’s Latte fix.

Where is the best app I have found for discovering places to go while using my G1. Where has you covered whether your looking for a Best Buy to pick up a movie or for some Chipotle burritos. It has you covered in almost every aspect. Where also does this much faster than Sherpa. Where is currently available in the Android Marketplace and is free. Where also has clients for the iPhone, Nokia Symbian, the Palm Pre and the Blackberry. Even if your phone isn’t in that list, you can access a lot of the same information by pointing your mobile web browser at http://m.where.com . For more information on Where, just check their website.

What I liked: Very speedy even on Edge networks. GPS integration, my places and the brands page makes it very easy to get your fix whether it’s Chipotle or Walmart. Where has you covered.

Joel is a consultant in the IT field and is located in Columbus, OH. While he loves Linux and tends to use it more than anything else, he will stoop to running closed source if it is the best tool for the job.His techno passions are Linux, Android, netbooks, GPS, podcasting and Amateur Radio.